Association for Preservation Technology International:
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TWA Hotel – Transforming the TWA Flight Center JFK Airport, Queens, New York
The TWA Flight Center, designed by Eero Saarinen, is one of the most significant examples of mid-century modern architecture in the Americas. Since its opening in 1962, the building’s expressive form helped define the modern airport terminal and served as a visual metaphor for flight. Conceived immediately before the advent of the jet age, the TWA Terminal was designed for smaller aircraft and underwent a number of modifications to adapt to the rapidly changing aviation industry. When Trans World Airlines ceased operations in 2001, the terminal was closed to the public and threatened with demolition.
Having worked to stabilize and protect the building since its closure, the TWA Hotel project is the culmination of 20 years’ involvement for Beyer Blinder Belle. The redevelopment of the TWA Flight Center reactivates this international landmark and opens it to the public as a hotel, restaurant and conference center. Completed in May 2019, the project has restored the integrity of the 1962 Flight Center, and constructed two new hotel wings and a subterranean conference center behind the historic building. The project includes a restored 1958 Lockheed Constellation airplane, a rooftop pool overlooking the JFK runway and interpretative exhibits on the history of TWA, Eero Saarinen and the mid-century Modern design movement.
AIA Credit: 1.0 AIA HSW
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Real Places is the premier historic preservation and heritage tourism conference in the Lone Star State, where anyone interested in protecting our past can work directly with industry-leading experts to learn practical, actionable solutions they can apply in their community. Presented by Phoenix I Restoration and Construction and hosted by the Friends of the Texas Historical Commission, Real Places 2021 will take place online, February 3–5, 2021.
Register for just $125. That’s more than $300 off the regular rate for the in-person event, and it comes without added lodging and travel expenses. Plus, you get the same exceptional educational experience Real Places always delivers. There will be 28 sessions on a variety of historic preservation and heritage tourism topics presented by 44 expert speakers from across Texas and the U.S.
Sessions will be available to attendees for at least 60 days following the conference. Organizations with multiple attendees can save 25 percent on additional registrations purchased at the same time. Full-time students with a valid ID can attend for just $50, thanks to the generous Real Places Student Scholarship Sponsors.
Learn more and sign up at realplaces.us
Nick Shepherd, Aarhus University
Jody Lynn Allen, The College of William and Mary
Sarah Beetham, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts
Tara Dudley, University of Texas at Austin
Rebecca Hankins, Texas A&M University
Tara Innis, University of the West Indies, Cave Hill
Diana Loren and Patricia Capone, Harvard University
Louis Nelson, University of Virginia
Bernard Powers, College of Charleston
Adam Rothman, Georgetown University
Rhondda Robinson Thomas, Clemson University
Featuring New and Emerging Preservation Research
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Throughout Fran’s career as an architectural conservator, visits to architectural libraries and archives provided valuable information about historic building materials and sites. As an emerging professional in New York City, she was a regular patron of Columbia University’s Avery Library. Having access to early photographs, architectural journals and trade catalogs was helpful in understanding the physical evidence that she discovered on historic preservation projects. Archival research yielded information on archaic building materials, decorative painting techniques and construction practices. The recommendations that Fran provided on important projects including the General Electric Building, New York Public Library and the Pension Building were often based on archival research as well as the results of laboratory and field examination of historic building materials.
A passion for library and archival research has continued throughout Fran’s career in architectural conservation. In 2007 she accepted a faculty/staff appointment at the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Architecture to teach as well as to work with UT’s Project Management and Construction Services on campus projects. Her shared goal was to update historic buildings on campus while preserving their distinctive elements and character defining features. During her tenure at UT, she made frequent visits to the Architectural and Planning Library and Alexander Archives where she poured through original specifications, early correspondence and remarkable construction photographs. Coupled with the examination and testing of features and finishes, archival research has been a critical component in preserving UT’s historic campus.
AIA Credit: 1.0 AIA HSW/LU
APT Texas is pleased to present Stone Preservation: Merging Traditional Approaches with Modern Technology, a presentation from the 2012 APTi Charleston Conference. Please register for Zoom link.
This webinar will present traditional and modern approaches to stone preservation and will focus on work being conducted at Lincoln Cathedral in Lincoln, UK, Salt Lake City & County Building and the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Charleston, SC. Speakers are: Neil Bywater (Lincoln Cathedral, Lincoln, U.K.); Elwin Robison (EDI Building Consultants, Inc., Independence, Ohio); and Ivan Myjer (Building & Monument Conservation, Arlington, Massachusetts). Webinar production was made possible with a grant from the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training (NCPTT).
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Recent scholarship and popular media have largely focused on a socio-cultural understanding of immigrants in the United States, with only limited investigations of their impact on the built and architectural environment. What spaces do these diasporic groups inhabit, adapt, build and propose? Competing impulses to ‘stand out’ and ‘blend in’ play out differently across building types, geographical locations and along economic and ethnic lines. As demographics have shifted and the American urban landscape has become increasingly diverse, particularly after the 1965 Immigration Reform Act, there is a need for an in-depth and nuanced analysis of the built world these immigrants have encountered, adapted, created and preserved in the last fifty years.
This presentation explores these questions through the lens of the South-Asian community in Houston. Houston is widely regarded as ‘the most diverse place in America’. Becoming a ‘majority-minority’ city in the last decade, it has a varied ethnic make-up, with Asian-Americans being its fastest growing sub-group. Yet, in a city known for its suburban sprawl, ‘no-zoning’ stance and generic strip-mall vernacular, it can be hard to trace the architectural manifestations of its immigrant culture. While there is a ‘Chinatown’ and ‘Little India’, they look very different from their more historicized versions in other major American cities. Here, they are automobile-centric adaptations of post-WWII white suburban enclaves. This paper will focus on ‘Mahatma Gandhi District’, the commercial and social hub of the South-Asian diaspora in Houston. Extending a few blocks along Hillcroft Avenue, a major city thoroughfare, the district is visually identified via placards atop road signs- installed following a failed attempt to rename a stretch of the road itself to Mahatma Gandhi Avenue. The research will chart the genesis of the roadway in 1950’s, to its transformation beginning in the 1970’s as the cultural spine of a burgeoning immigrant population.
Credit: 1.0 AIA HSW
APT Texas is pleased to present Curtain and Cavity Walls: Preservation and Technical Concerns, a presentation from the 2013 APTi New York City Conference. Please register to receive the Zoom login.
This webinar includes discussions on the cavity and curtain walls with examples of their construction, repair and preservation on various landmark buildings throughout the United States. Speakers are: Matthew Bronski, PE (Simpson Gumpertz & Heger Inc); James Dossett (The Façade Group); Annie Lo (McGinnis Chen Associates, Inc); and Eliza Hernandez Skaggs (Page & Turnbull). Webinar production was made possible with a grant from the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training (NCPTT).
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